A man's life under the Channel

A chill breeze eddies through the man-sized opening in the damp marl which now joins Britain and France, 200 feet under the Channel.

The air movement reflects the difference in atmospheric pressure between the two sides of the Channel. And yesterday it was blowing symbolically towards Europe as workers chatted in the subterranean gloom.

But that is the only relief from the heat and dust-laden air after you have jolted and shuddered your way across the 17 miles to the crossover point.

Dignitaries were provided with a sound-proofed train to celebrate Saturday's breakthrough in the £7.6bn tunnel project, the moment when the two tunnels became one. But yesterday the outside world got a taste of the conditions Channel tunnel workers face in the first 'passenger' train to attempt a Channel crossing.

In what may have been an unfortunate foretaste of what regular passengers can expect when the chunnel opens for business in 1993, completion of the journey on the French side was prevented by the familiar story of maintenance work and signal problems. But a two hour six minute journey to the breakthrough point was quite enough for the first time traveller. Cramped on hard seats in tiny unlit open-sided carriages, it was like a journey into Hades. Or even Network SouthEast on a bad day.

As soon as you step down from the entrance shaft, 400 foot under Folkestone's Shakespeare Cliffs, the temperature rises noticeably.

A welter of notice boards reminds workers that defecation outside the provided conveniences is a dismissable offence. 'Don't abuse your tools,' runs another warning. It's a man's world all those miles along the Channel tunnel.

Standing in a junction of tunnels stretching more than 40 foot high, the Channel tunnel technical director, Colin Kirkland, points: 'That's the way to France.' Green and red signals blink in the distance.

By the time the pocket-sized diesel train gets under way, the temperature has risen to almost 85F. The noise, dust and dry heat hits the first time visitor hard. We are 'greenhorns' in tunnel workers' slang.

Web netting stops you falling out of the carriage or losing a limb to oncoming trains, which pass four inches away.

It is a vital precaution. For whatever the astonishment at Eurotunnel's achievement, the warm oven of the dark carriage is as soporific as a high-dose sleeping pill. You can only pray that the gigantic fresh air pipe, suspended like an umbilical cord on the mottled tunnel ceiling, is doing its work.

Through drooping eyelids, you strain to concentrate on the flashing lights and glimpses of workers hunched over machinery. Or you marvel at the way engineers have held up the sea and the overlying rock, which presses down at 2,000lb per square inch.

Mr Kirkland, like most of the thousand workers who were yesterday pressing ahead with tunnelling, appears inured to the hardships. But that diesel-fumed journey is just the start of their working day. Even with a wage packet of up to £50,000 a year for shifts lasting as long as 12 hours, their money is clearly hard-earned.

Picking your way gingerly on raised steel boards, you hardly realise that you are now in France. There is no formal notice nor indeed the metaphoric smell of garlic. But there is the sharp tang of Gauloise cigarette smoke. For, unlike their British counterparts, French workers are allowed tobacco and wine underground. British workers, by contrast, live on tea, toffee and filled bread rolls provided for them, and on site. They are not allowed to bring their own rations for fear that debris could attract rodents.

Eurotunnel officials are clearly nonplussed by these liberal continental ways. But British workers are permitted to indulge modestly if invited by their French counterparts. It is clearly an added incentive for convivial fraternisation all those feet under the Channel.